Cupcake Cuties

Have you heard of Pinterest? It is an awesome site full of cool pics. You can create your own virtual "pinboards" with pictures you find on the net. It is a great place to go for inspiration, but also just as a "happy place". I love it. Today I thought I might share a few cute cupcake pics I found on there.

This one makes me want to get out in the garden and start digging!

Source: img580.imageshack.us via Orara on Pinterest

Talk about elegance plus!

Source: flickr.com via Orara on Pinterest

These definately bring out the inner child!

Source: etsy.com via Orara on Pinterest

Now THAT'S what you call an apple for the teacher!

Source: google.com via Orara on Pinterest

I WANT!! I WANT!!! I WANT!!!!

Source: 2.bp.blogspot.com via Orara on Pinterest

Kiss me honey!

Source: williams-sonoma.com via Orara on Pinterest

What cool cupcake finds have you stumbled across lately?

Left Over Cake

What to do with left over cake?  There are a million and one different things that you can do, but this one would have to be one of my family’s favourites.  I often have trimmings left over from my sculpted cakes, and after events like the Annual Nana Glen Market Day, I usually have a heap of left over cupcakes (over catering is in my blood!)  Sometimes I freeze them for the girls’ school snack or afternoon tea, other times I make cake balls, but now that the weather is cooling down, cake pudding is well and truly back on the menu!  It is super easy, super yummy, and microwaves up a treat for breakfast if I  really feel like spoiling the kids!

First of all, preheat your oven to 180oC, then grease a deep baking dish.  Next break up all your left over cake into chunks.  If it is plain cake, I like to throw in chocolate chips or jam dollops to really make it delicious!

Now all you need to do is make a quick baked custard mix.  I do this by whisking together 4-5 eggs, 3 tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla and a pinch of salt.  Once they are mixed in really well and the sugar is almost dissolved, add 900ml milk.  Mix it in thoroughly then pour it over the cake.

Finally, take a larger baking dish and put a tea towel or cloth in the bottom, place the dish with the cake inside, then pour boiling water into the larger dish until it comes halfway up the sides of the smaller dish to make a water bath.  Place them in the oven and bake for 45 minutes to one hour, or until the custard has set.

 

All that’s left to do now is serve it up and tuck in!  It is especially yummy with whipped cream or ice cream!  The bits on top that are poking out of the custard go all crispy and crunchy while the rest of it is a beautiful pudding consistency.

 

Super quick, super easy, and super yum!

PS Sorry the photos aren’t very good, but it was late on a school night and I was rushing!

What is your favourite way to use up left over cake?

Harmony Day 2011

Having spent 9 years of my childhood living overseas in various countries, multiculturalism is a subject very close to my heart.  I was fortunate to grow up with friends from all over the world, many of whom I still keep in touch with today.  At the International Schools that I attended, United Nations Day was one of the biggest and most anticipated celebrations of the year.  We all wore national costume (there were almost 70 nationalities at the schools) and the parents set up stands with traditional foods from their own countries for all us kids to try.  (Funny how few people actually enjoyed our vegemite sandwiches though!)  Now that I have 2 young children of my own, I work hard to instil empathy and appreciation of other cultures in them.  I really think that understanding other cultures helps to prevent cultural disharmony, and I think that food is one of the best vehicles to cross the divide.

Two years ago when my youngest daughter was at the Nana Glen Preschool, I was introduced to Harmony Day when they put on a special lunch.  The Mum’s were asked to bring in a plate of food from their own heritage.  Not having grown up on traditional Aussie tucker, I decided to take in mini cupcakes each with a different coloured person on top, in keeping with the Harmony Day posters.  Being cake, and brightly coloured, they were a big hit with the kids.

This year, I was lucky enough to be able to provide the Coffs Harbour Library with mini cupcakes for their Harmony Day Family Morning Tea and Story Time.  Also, a very dear friend of mine who works at Southern Cross University invited me to be involved with their celebrations.  Another big fan of cupcakes (let’s face it…who isn’t!) she thought that cupcake decorating would be a great way to bring people together.  So, I baked 100 chocolate and vanilla cupcakes, made a mountain of icing and we went and bought a stack of lollies and sprinkles.  We set up a couple of big tables and let the students go for it.  It was fantastic!  They all had a ball.  It was such a hit in fact, that we made the local news with NBN reporter Clare Deligny even decorating a cupcake for the camera!  Check out the video here!

I took lots of photos of all the marvelous cupcake creations and their artists, so if you were there on the day, have a look here for your photo and feel free to send a link to all of your friends!  Also send me your name and I’ll tag you in the photo.

Happy Harmony Day everyone!

SCU Harmony Day Cupcakes VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Theobromine - That Part of Chocolate that Makes You Feel Good!!

Well, I'm stuck at my parents' house on "holidays" (and I use the term very loosely) with the dreaded swine flu. I am literally under house arrest with 2 small children to amuse who just want to go home and see their chickens.  How to entertain them and myself? Make a completely edible molecular model of theobromine of course! My brother, aka Scon, told me about this site a while ago and said I should really check it out, especially the foodie bit. Like him, I am a bit far down on the geek scale...probably a bit more nerd than geek though, I dig the chemistry/biology more and get a bit lost with some of the IT, but hey, what a cool site!  Anyway, enough rambling, here we go. This took place over 2 days as energy levels and compulsory rest (and vomit) breaks required!! Oh yeah, and in case you didn't know, theobromine is the active chemical in chocolate (higher in dark chocolate) that makes you feel good! If you are wondering where the "bromine" molecule is, you won't find it, it is named from the cacao plant Theobroma sp.

Nana Glen Mum's Edible Molecular Model of Theobromine

PART 1 - CAKE

This recipe is from "cakepro"  at Cake Central

Ingredients

2.5 Cups Flour

1.5 Cups Sugar

3 Tablespoons cocoa

0.5 teaspoon salt

1.25 teaspoon bicarb soda

1 Cup Butter

2 Eggs

1 ounce red food colouring (I omit this)

1 Cup Buttermilk (I just use normal full fat milk)

1 teaspoon Vanilla

Directions

Preheat oven to 180C.

Sift dry ingredients and set aside.

Beat butter and sugar in electric mixer until light and fluffy. Bet in eggs on at a time and add colouring (if you are using it). Add vanilla. Add half the flour, all the milk, then the rest of the flour, mixing as little as possible to combine.

Pour the batter into 2 round pans (I just put it in one big rectangular one as it is going to get broken up anyway) and bake for 35-45 minutes (depending on the size of the pan). Cool in pan for 10 minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack.

Let it cool

Now for the fun part, get those hands in there and gently break it up into lots and lots of little crumbs!! Put it aside and make the frosting.

PART 2 - FROSTING

This recipe is from "Carol" at Cake Central

Ingredients

225g Cream Cheese, softened

56g Butter, softened

1 Tablespoons lemon juice (I used lime)

1 Teaspoon vanilla

5 Cups Icing Sugar Mixture (not pure icing sugar - it will set too hard)

Directions

Beat cream cheese, butter, lemon juice and vanilla together until smooth and fluffy. Add sugar in 2 batches.

PART 3 - SHAPING

Gently fold the frosting into the cake crumbs. YUMMY! Be sure to taste it at this stage (no reason - just cause it tastes good!!) Shape the mixture into balls and place onto a tray lined with baking paper. I made my balls in 4 different sizes to represent the 4 atoms that make up the molecule.

PART 4 - COATING Ordinarily when I make cake pops (and all credit here goes to Bakerella for the COOLEST cake pops ever!!) I just coat them in melted chocolate, which I did for the smallest balls (Hydrogen). They were nice and easy. I just melted some white chocolate over simmering water, dropped them in and scooped them out and left them on a tray to cool and set. For the rest, I wanted colour, and as I am housebound at the moment, I had to make-do with what I could find in Mum's pantry, so sugar and food colouring to the rescue! I made up some toffee and coloured it with your regular supermarket food colourings. Here's how:

Ingredients

0.25 Cups Sugar

1 Cup Water

1 teaspoon Glucose

Food Colouring or cocoa

Directions

Place water, sugar and glucose in a small, heavy based saucepan and stir until ALL the sugar has dissolved. Bring it to the boil and STOP STIRRING immediately! With a pastry brush dipped in water, brush any crystals off the inside of the pan. Boil for 20 minutes until a spoonful of toffee dropped in a glass of cold water makes a "crack" sound and forms a hard ball. Take it off the heat and add a few drops of colouring or 2 teaspoons of cocoa. Carefully drop one ball in at a time, turning it over with a fork to evenly coat, then drain the excess toffee from it and place the coated ball on a lined tray to cool and set.

PART 5 - ASSEMBLY

Now for the fun part! Grab a heap of toothpicks, a metal skewer, a candle, a box of matches, tray and either baking paper or a silicon mat. Because the toffee dries hard, there is no way you can push a toothpick in without shattering it...ask me how I know!! So, you light the candle with the matches and hold the metal skewer in the flame for a few seconds then push it through the toffee shell into the cake centre, wiggle it around a bit, take it out and you have a hole just the right size to poke your toothpick in! Yippee it works! Assemble molecule as desired. So folks, after much ado, here it is, my edible molecular model of theobromine. A cooking and chemistry lesson all in one for the kids (pity they are only 4 and 6 - I think the science was a bit lost on them - but they loved the taste!!) In case you are wondering, the small white chocolate balls are the Hydrogen, the blue ones are Nitrogen, the red are Oxygen and the black (cocoa) ones are Carbon.

Fishing Boat Cake

My friend's daughter turned 11 the other day and I offered to make her a cake.  It turns out she is saving up to buy herself a little fishing boat, so naturally, that is what the cake had to be! I made a 23cm square mud cake and covered it with Fluffy Frosting which has a lovely smooth and almost shiny finish - not matt like most icings.  I then made up some Piping Gel from caster sugar, cornflour, lemon juice and water and dyed it with blue and green colourings for the water.  All the other decorations were made from fondant.  It ended up being a really easy cake to make and transport, and a quick dusting with silver lustre on the boat gave it a nice metallic effect.  Needless to say, she loved it!!

Thomas the Tank Engine Cake Tutorial - Part 1- How I did it.

Well, here I go.  Miss M turned 4 at the start of the month, and like any unconventional little girl, opted out of fairies and princesses for her birthday cake and insisted on Thomas the Tank Engine.   No great surprise since she lives, eats and breathes Thomas.  I have to buy her underwear in the boys’ section because sh

Technorati Tags: cake,birthday,kid's birthday cake,party,Thomas the Tank Engine,cake decorating,fondant,icing,train,train party

e insists on Thomas undies like her friends (boys) at preschool.  She wears Thomas pyjamas to bed and Thomas t-shirts to preschool.  Everyday she plays with her Thomas train track (talk about value for money mind you!!) and so on it goes, I’m sure you are getting the picture!  The surprise for me though came when she SAID NO TO CHOCOLATE CAKE!!!! and insisted on CARROT CAKE! I kid you not!  You could have knocked me down with a feather!  Anyway, here is how I went about it…

I had read that it is easier to carve your cake if you freeze it first.  I’m guessing it depends on the type of cake.  The carrot cake turned out hard as a rock (and I have very sharp knives) and was very difficult to cut.  My suggestion would be to cut the cake and then freeze it before icing to stop crumbs getting into the cake.  I’ll try that one myself next cake and let you know how it goes.  I have to make a Lightning McQueen this week for Miss M’s friend.

I baked the cake in a square slab pan and cut it into two equal rectangles.  I contemplated baking it in 2 loaf tins but decided against it as loaf tins tend to have sloping sides.  I then put one half to the side for later.

Step 1

With the half I was working with, I cut it in half laterally to make it lower ie cut

the top half off the bottom half so it looked like this:

After that, I just pretty much broke Thomas down into a series of squares and a circle at the front at stuck them all together with buttercream.  Here comes a photo series of what I did.  I tried to get a couple of pictures of each stage from various angles.  Hope it’s not too boring or repetitive.

Step 2

From the half I had put to the side, I cut it in half lengthways ie front to back and placed on half on top, aligned at the back.



Step 3

Using a circle cutter, I cut a round and placed it in front of the piece from Step 2.



Step 4

Using a circle cutter, I cut a second round and placed it in front of the piece from Step 3.



Step 5

From lower cake half, I cut a strip and placed it on top of the large block, again aligned at the back.



Step 6

From the higher remains, I cut another block, but lowered it slightly and placed it in front of the piece from Step 5.



Step 7

I put small squares beside the first round.



Step 8

I cut 2 1/4 circles and placed them in front of the squares from Step 7.

Guess what…all done!  Not to hard at all eh?  Now it’s your turn – be sure to send me photos!



I didn’t take photos of how I iced the cake.  As we live out in the country, I can’t buy fondant so I have had to make my own.  I found an excellent recipe at Gingerbread House Heaven.  I used their Professional fondant recipe and had great results even though our relative humidity was excessive – we were actually flooded in for 3 days while I made the cake!  Luckily the water dropped and the roads opened in time for the party!  I did the blue first and worked my way forwards.  I made the wheels a few days earlier and dried them out completely so they were nice and hard, and then just stuck them on with a bit of left over buttercream.  I sat the entire cake on a foil lined biscuit tin lid to raise it slightly off thecake board so that the wheels looked about the right level.  As for the face, I had read another great tutorial over at Thomas the Tank Engine Tutorial

Technorati Tags: tutorial

and was going to try and sculpt the face myself, but wimped out because my sculpting skills are very very ordinary!  I got some oven bake polymer clay and made an imprint with one of Miss M’s toys.  She has a puzzle that has plastic pieces that make a front on view of Thomas.  I took the face piece, pushed it into the clay and baked the clay to make it hard.  When I was ready to make the face, I coloured it grey, then pushed a big piece over the mould and rolled it slightly with a rolling pin for even pressure.  When I pulled the fondant off the clay, I had a wonderful 3 dimensional face!  I used a round cutter (the same one I used for the circle pieces of cake so they were a perfect fit) to cut the face out, and then just added in the coloured details.  It actually turned out to be quite a simple exercise once I broke it all down.

So now you know how to cut up the cake and put it back together again, you'll be ready to ice it.  Here is how I covered the cake in Part 2 of the tutorial.

Anyway, I hope you have found this helpful, and if you actually know what you are doing, I would love to hear about how I can improve my cake decorating – especially getting my fondant nice and even – it always has lots of lumps and bumps.